[ale] Speaking of Slackware...

[Jonathan Rickman]

> The real tool for keeping Slackware up to date is Swaret:
> 
> http://swaret.sourceforge.net/index.php
> 
> It functions kind of like yum for RedHat. You tell it what 
> version you're on, where to download and what to ignore, then:
> 
> swaret --upgrade

Not to mention that it will automatically back up the old package (up to 3
versions) for you so that you can roll back an update easily. It is an
excellent package management tool, and can easily be extended to maintain a
great number of systems simultaneously. It has dependency checking, MD5
verification, optional PGP signature verification, etc, etc. If building
from source is your thing, it will do that too, either automagically, or by
caching a local copy of the source for you to work with manually. The only
thing it doesn't currently do is run /sbin/lilo for you on kernel updates.
Kernel updates are disabled by default, but they work just fine too. There's
a lot of cool stuff in the Slackware world that a lot of potential users are
unaware of. Usually because they don't even consider Slackware due to its
reputation for being difficult...which is actually easily discredited.

--
Jonathan